8x1.5 foot Port Able Railway HO Scale Time Saver Variation

[Mike Kieran]

   

I now have the final(?) track plan for the Port Able Railway. I am planning on an easily transportable (hence the name Port Able) layout 8 feet long by 1.5 feet wide that stores easily and sets up quickly. It will have two wings on each end so that it will fold into a 48x18x3 inch carrying case/sleeve that I will slide the layout into. The layout will be 3 inches deep so that I can store the rolling stock, power supply, and support legs within the layout and carrying case. The structures will be transported in a separate tote. I plan on modeling the summer of 1979 because I have an obsession with IPD box cars.

The backstory is that once the Port Able Shipbuilding Company shut down in 1978, the city of Port Able bought the property and repurposed it into an industrial park. The Port Able Railway was named as the designated operator to provide rail service to the former shipyard. The Atlantic Lines bring in cars from the left side of the layout and drops them off into either yard track 1 or 2.

I was originally going to go with an 8x1 foot track plan, but I decided to add another track to the “yard” so that sorting will be easier and so that I had a little more room for scenery. With the extra width, I will be able to add the crane canopy for the manufacturing company in the upper left corner of the plan. I also bent the track in the lower left corner of the plan so that center beam flat cars may be unloaded from both sides. There is a small dock in the lower left hand corner so that I have a reason to give the layout a maritime name.

The switchback in the upper right of the plan is long enough to accommodate a car in E. D. Ibble Foods and a small train of 2 cars and a locomotive to serve the manufacturing plant and chair company. I designed the layout so that at maximum, one car would be pulled and one car would be dropped at each spur. I plan to run 3-5 cars per operating session by rolling a dice and using a shuffled deck of index cards for each industry.

Here is a list of the maximum number of car loadings per week: